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Contact: Debbie Morton at Mercyhurst College, 814.824.2552
Archaeology offers ‘best’ answer at plane crash site
When Continental Airlines Flight 3407 crashed near Buffalo, N.Y., in February 2009, killing 50 people, all but one victim was accounted for, leaving an already anguished family at a loss for answers.
The recovery of human remains from outdoor settings requires a strict set of scientific protocols, according to Mercyhurst College forensic anthropologist Dennis Dirkmaat, whose team was charged with retrieving the victims’ remains from the ill-fated flight.
“You don’t want to rush to get the job done or you risk fragmentation and comingling of remains,” Dirkmaat said. “We take an archaeological approach that enables us to collect material in context and to reconstruct past events, and we are one of the few in the world that do it this way.”
The approach, which calls for a comprehensive excavation and mapping of the scene using state-of-the-art equipment like the Total Station and GPS, allowed Dirkmaat to reconstruct what had most likely happened to the one victim unaccounted for after the remains of all 49 others had been identified.
“We were able to look at the passenger manifest and match it to the scene that we had carefully mapped out, and we discovered the missing passenger had been situated in a pile of debris that had burned for 17 hours. Fire alteration had destroyed any DNA,” Dirkmaat said. “But, because of the way we processed the scene, we were at least able to offer the victim’s loved ones the best answer possible to what had happened and help give closure.”
In recent years, forensic anthropologists have been challenged to take a close look at their discipline in terms of presenting evidence in court and having it meet the Daubert standard for scientific admissibility, Dirkmaat said.
“We realized we could not collect material out of context; there were too many clues left behind and we turned to archaeology for the answers,” he said.
Dirkmaat is one of nearly 20 panelists who will exchange analytic best practices at the Dungarvan Conference, a global intelligence summit hosted by the Mercyhurst College Institute for Intelligence Studies July 11-13 in Dungarvan, Ireland.
